UC roundup.

By no means a complete list, but stuff that caught my eye.

• UC Davis asks instructors to teach freshmen writing seminars for free
• UCD library budget, static over the last decade while the student population increased, now to fall
• UC-wide Academic Senate opposes fee increases for graduate students—“fee increases will result in fewer graduate students at UC. Aside from disappointing would-be graduate students, reductions will affect undergraduates and faculty by shrinking the number of teaching assistants, leading to fewer small discussion sections and negative impacts on faculty research.”

Not on the menu.

The highly recommended crabs, that is, at the Seaside Restaurant in Glen Burnie, MD, close by BWI. The service is great and the ambience just what you want from a place that will wrap your table in brown paper and bring you a load of filter feeders and a mallet. And beer.

They put the spice rub on the shell, so when you pull it apart you get the spices on your fingers, and when you pick out the meat you get the spices on the meat. A fine system.

My brother and I happened to have a chance to visit and partake last week.

Everything changed.

If you haven’t seen the episode, feel free to read this. No real spoilers ahead.

As someone who knows a little too much about the subject, I’ve been eagerly awaiting Mad Men’s portrayal of the Kennedy assassination.  And when it came, on Sunday night, I thought the episode was beautifully done. But I found myself less intrigued by the portrayal of the event itself than by how the writers used the assassination to advance the one of the show’s main themes: that white, middle-class American women suffered from the feminine mystique in the 1960s, and they weren’t going to take it anymore.  In Mad Men’s universe, John Kennedy died Sunday night, but Betty Draper is just starting to live.

The writers have dropped hints throughout the season that the show would address the assassination: the brief shot of Margaret Sterling’s wedding announcement, with its portentous date; the eerie recreation of the Zapruder film with the John Deere accident in episode 6; the frequent references to dates as the episodes moved through 1963, with November always looming in the distance.  And, when the event finally came, the show handled it with grace and intelligence.  I loved the way that Walter Cronkite came on the television set in the background, with the volume on low, as Peter and Harry discussed office politics, completely oblivious to the news, and the sudden emphasis on TV, as everyone gravitated to sets throughout the episode.  Overall, there was the general sense of tragedy, loss, and confusion, especially after Oswald’s murder. “What is going on?” both Don and Betty ask, separately.

But the story of Betty’s gradual awakening was integrated with the narrative of the assassination in a way that brought home to me why so many women like this show.  I know a lot of men who despise it; they see a loathsome main character, Don Draper, who lies and cheats on his wife; they see pervasive misogyny, and it makes them feel uncomfortable and depressed.

Many women, though, understand and empathize with how the female characters are objectified and mistreated.  But at the same time, we know that, while sexism has hardly disappeared, women have a lot more options and, yes, a lot more power than they did in 1963.  As the show moves through the early 1960s, the anger builds, but the opportunities unfold.  We know where this story is going, and we like the ending.

It ate the food it ne’er had eat.

When US sailors first set foot on Midway (then called Brooks) in 1867, the birds were so numerous on the ground that the men could not walk without stepping on the chicks in their nests. Now we can accomplish the same results without traveling to a remote atoll to do it in person.

Chomp.

So, about half a month ago, when I started writing this post, Yglesias argued that the way celebrity chefs should be helping people eat healthier food is by aiding the production of pre-packaged meals that are better for you.   Why?

If over time people were getting poorer, but the number of hours in the day was getting longer, and gender norms were shifting toward the idea that women should get married young and drop out of the workforce in order to do unpaid domestic work, then obviously people would start cooking more. But that’s not what’s happening. Compared to people in 1959, people in 2009 have more money, less time, and less ability to call on socially sanctioned unpaid domestic labor. So obviously they’re going to cook less. Or to look at it another way, there are lots of things you can do in 2009 that you couldn’t do in 1959—read a blog, download an MP3, get a movie from Netflix on Demand. There are also a lot of things you can do in 2009 that were prohibitively expensively in 1959—fly cross-country, make a long-distance phone call to your sister. But there’s no more time in the day. Which implies that people need to spend less time doing the things that you could do in 1959. Sometimes we can get out of this box by finding technological innovations that let us do things more quickly, but you can’t really speed up cooking from scratch.

The good news is that there’s no real reason to think that food you prepare yourself is for some reason intrinsically healthier than food someone else prepares for you.

Eh.  I’m not convinced.  Ta-Nehisi Coates has a good story about what he learned when he first baked blueberry muffins.  Baking treats yourself ensures you know what goes into them.

To that I’d add a couple of points.  Portion size is much easier to control when you cook your own food, as is the addition of salt, spices, and fats.  It also strikes me as unlikely that the best organic hippie-dippie free-range pre-packaged food imaginable will be free of stabilizers and preservatives.  While I don’t want to return to 1959 (though I think the argument that we have less time is somewhat undercut by the idea that blogging and Netflix are these new things we do), I think there’s no way around the idea that home cooking is better for you, especially if you’re in an area where your take-out options are limited to unhealthy fast food.

It’s not a metaphysical certainty, but I know which way I’d bet, and it’s not on Auguste Gusteau’s Frozen Dinners becoming common (or, for that matter, affordable.)

I think the problem here is conceptual.  (Shut up, Neddy.)  Says Yglesias, “I like to cook. Sometimes. I think it’s fun. And I’m certainly glad I know a few recipes. I hope to learn more. And everyone should know a few, “  but there’s a difference between recipes and techniques, and its the latter that gets the cook through every day.

Bling.

In these times of budget cuts, enforced furloughs, and layoffs on the one hand, and higher student fees on the other, it’s important for faculty and staff in higher education to evince an appropriate awareness of this atmosphere of austerity…. oh, you must be joking.

Spotted at a local community college, so don’t start in about the privileges of the UC….

It’s Quiet. Yeah, Too Somnolent.

I’m hoping that Amazon doesn’t actually put this into action:

Method and apparatus for programmatically substituting synonyms into distributed text content. A synonym substitution mechanism may programmatically replace selected words in textual data with synonyms for the selected words. The modification to an excerpt performed by the synonym substitution mechanism may not significantly alter the meaning of the excerpt to a human reader. By replacing one or more selected words in an excerpt with synonyms for the words, illicit copies of the excerpt may be recognized by comparing a copy of the excerpt to the original. Particular permutations of synonym substitutions may be provided in excerpts to particular requestors. The particular permutations may be recorded and used to determine a requestor as the source of a copy of the excerpt. Synonym substitution may make programmatic excerpt chaining difficult by substituting different synonyms for the same word(s) in an overlapping portion of two adjacent excerpts.

The dangers are obvious, albeit entertaining:

“We have nothing to fear, but apprehension itself.”

“I have nothing to offer, but blood, toil, tears, and elbow grease.”

“We few, we happy few, we unofficial association of brothers.”

“I am a jelly donut.”

So much for textual analysis or the linguistic turn.

[Hat-tip to John Scalzi]

Method as identity.

Is it not ill-advised that historians often identify ourselves by method as well as, or even rather than, by subject of interest? I.e., we often say “I’m a social historian” or “I’m a cultural historian” as well as or rather than, “I’m a historian of the US South.”

I think this way of talking and thinking is based on a faulty analogy to shop labor. It’s a bit like saying, “I am a lathe operator.” Except, the thing is, it’s fine to be a lathe operator if you’re a good lathe operator; there’s plenty of objects that need lathing and there will be for the foreseeable future.

The same is not true for history. In history, people are seized by methodological enthusiasms; it may suddenly seem like the lathe is the way to go, and there are projects that demand expertise in the lathe. So you train up on the lathe, and you lathe away, and your project’s done, and then you look around for another lathe-worthy project.

But in history, unlike in shop labor, it turns out there often isn’t another such project—they’ve dried up. The interesting lathe-answerable questions got answered.

At which point you either moan about how the AHA doesn’t want to put on panels about lathing anymore, or you try to use a lathe for a project that really, you ought to be using a jigsaw for, and make a complete mess of it, or—and this is of course the ideal choice—you train up on the jigsaw and you use it for the next project.

There’s actually a fancy French phrase for approaching history as a series of problems requiring solution: histoire problème.

Why don’t we all just say we practice histoire problème—I mean, Michael Kammen says it’s pervasive, right? or at least we could say that we’re problem solvers using whatever tools are useful—instead of getting in a lather about lathers?

Related: where is the American histoire totale?

Terrible.

Today this blog is two. For those of you who want more reminiscing, here’s the post on the occasion of its first birthday, which answers some FAQs.

Where you stand depends on where it sits.

Robert Arnesen’s egghead sculptures are a prominent feature of the UC Davis campus. I learned only recently that one was duplicated for an installation in San Francisco.

Reproductions of Arneson’s Yin and Yang Eggheads appear along the Embarcadero, situated together just east of the Justin Herman Plaza fountain, across from the Port of San Francisco Ferry Building. The sculpture was dedicated in mid-December. A plaque recognizes it as a reproduction of one in a series of five acrylic-on-bronze sculptures commissioned for UC Davis.

A native of Benicia, Arneson taught ceramics at UC Davis from 1962 to 1991. His Egghead sculptures were created for specific campus locations and were installed during 1991-94. The original Yin and Yang Eggheads sit outside the UC Davis fine arts complex courtyard, where they were positioned by Arneson himself shortly before his death in 1992.

The eggheads that appear in San Francicso were cast in 2002 from Arneson’s original molds. Installers positioned the two Eggheads in San Francisco, orienting them like those at UC Davis.

I don’t know what they think the word “like” in that last sentence means, but here is the San Francisco Yin and Yang, from that same page:

And here is the original Yin and Yang, as placed, according to the article, by Arnesen himself:

Worst. Marketing. Ever.

America’s America.

The current print edition of the American Prospect has a center pullout section on Inequality Goes to College. It’s worth reading, though hardly cheerful. And the Golden State is all over it.

Agincourt & Iraq

This is a much more nuanced view of the state of the military history field than earlier efforts

The work, which has received both glowing praise and sharp criticism from other historians in the United States and Europe, is the most striking of the revisionist accounts to emerge from a new science of military history. The new accounts tend to be not only more quantitative but also more attuned to political, cultural and technological factors, and focus more on the experience of the common soldier than on grand strategies and heroic deeds.

More, it actually connects that new form of history (traditionally identified as the “New Military History” and starting with John Keegan’s The Face of Battle) with larger issues, both historical and present. If I was being particularly tetchy, I might note that the article is behind the times–Keegan’s book came out in the 1970s–and that military history is now pushing past the “New Military History” into what some have facetiously referred to as the “New New Military History.” That would be petulant of me, however, so I will simply be glad to see a sophisticated account of the topic.

Threat.

I’d missed this till today:

A Russian historian investigating the fate of Germans imprisoned in the Soviet Union during the second world war has been arrested, in the latest apparent clampdown on historical research into the Stalin era by the Russian authorities.

Mikhail Suprun was detained last month by officers from Russia’s security services. They searched his apartment and carried off his entire personal archive. He has now been charged with violating privacy laws and, if convicted, faces up to four years in jail.

Suprun had been researching Germans sent to Russia’s Arctic gulags. A professor of history at Arkhangelsk’s Pomorskiy university, his study included German prisoners of war captured by the Red Army as well as Russian-speaking ethnic Germans, many from southern Russia, deported by Stalin. Both groups ended up in Arkhangelsk camps.

“I had been planning to write two books. I need another two or three years before I can finish them,” Suprun told the Guardian today. The historian – who described his arrest as “absurd” – said he had signed an agreement with local officials not to talk further about his case.

But the arrest has provoked outrage in Germany and among leading historians. It comes amid Kremlin attempts to rehabilitate Stalin and to clamp down on independent historical research – with political repression during the Soviet era and victims of the gulag system now taboo topics.

Today the historian and writer Orlando Figes described Suprun’s arrest as unprecedented, and part of a “Putinite campaign against freedom of historical research and expression”. Figes, professor of history at Birkbeck college, London University, added: “[It's] potentially quite alarming, if it means that the regime intends to clamp down on the collection of personal data about the Stalin terror.”

Completely unlike Ivy life today.

Plucked from one of Delbanco’s essays.

In 1912, Owen Johnson’s enduringly popular novel (most recently reprinted in 2003) Stover at Yale gave a picture of Ivy life as a gladiatorial contest among alpha males who, by beating out their rivals for a spot on the team or in the club, learned to achieve “victory…on the broken hopes of a comrade,” and went on to rule the nation.

You’re coming to the talk, right?

In crisis, I tell you.

Notes for an event tomorrow.

Of course the answer is “because of the Sokal hoax”.¹

---

¹Joking! The Sokal hoax is a dismissible sideshow.^2
2Joking! The Sokal hoax actually does touch on important elements of the crisis. But it has nothing to do with history, which isn’t in the humanities.^3
3Joking! Sort of.

How we do.

Ari and I are teaching the methods and philosophy seminar for incoming graduate students, all fields of history. If you’re interested, please have a look below the fold to see what we’ve assigned.

Why Olympia Snowe Can Do What She Wants, Pretty Much

Because she’s just basically popular in Maine:

Fascinating numbers for Olympia Snowe. Her approval rating with Democrats is 25 points higher than with Republicans- in fact her approval numbers with Democrats are better than they are for many of the Democratic Senators we’ve polled on across the country this year.

Like Ben Nelson on the Democratic side, she’s a GOP Senator in a state dominated by the other party. If the Republicans try to get rid of her via the primary, they’ll lose the seat, probably permanently.

(Hat-tip to Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire)

Reductio ad abdomen.

Body-building philosophy professor.

This item is not eligible for free shipping.

Milk! 5 left at $69.99!

The reviews are priceless.